all good, entries received, going to be honest the the research for the last puzzle would literally take you 5 minutes, I didn’t make it very hard
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maybe Kalotan doesn’t want to mess up his browser history with extra google searches in case someone looks at it 
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Maybe, but I have better things to do in those 5 minutes than google info about **** and ****. Like Watching the Midoriya vs Todoroki fight again for the 57th time.
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Hey, do what you feel, just thought I should let you know.
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Can we have a sneak peak about the number of people who solved the ARG? 
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Keep your calm, it’s only a couple of hours left and then I’m sure @PeteMCC will furnish us with all the information we desire and don’t go blurting out all the answers just because the time limit has been reached and it’s over. Pete deserves to give those up at his leisure.
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30 minutes till entries close, last chance everyone!
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Aw, I can’t find the puzzle I was about to post (and it’s corresponding solution), so I will update this post once I can.
If possible, though, I would like to enter for the following classic Rockstar games:
- GTA III
- MAX PAYNE 1
- MAX PAYNE 2
Good luck, everyone, and may the Coins be with you 
!
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And with that the entries are closed. Its going to take a little while to gather all the entries together and find the winners, so please be patient. I will reveal the solutions to the puzzles soon.
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since no one solved my puzzle, i demand all other entries than mine be declared null and void 
, -gnoma victus!
PS. the answer to my question, 2+2=?, was (unsurprisingly!): 22, makes sense right? 
since i didn’t enter ofc; -kidding aside: congrats to any winner ofc 
and thank you Pete for all your work with giveaway and ARG! 
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@PeteMcc, thank you so much for putting the ARG together and for the wonderful fun we have all had this past week! Cheers! 
Congratulations to the winner!
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@PeteMcc how surprised were you with your results, did you think more people would pass/not pass? Are you happy with the results where the questions were hard enough for people to struggle? If you do attempt another will they be easier or harder?
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15 people who entered solved the final puzzle. There were others who didn’t enter the giveaway who also solved it.
Didn’t really know coming into it, I wanted to make it easy enough for people to want to join in but difficult enough for it to be challenging and fun. Only had 3 people have a go at all the puzzles before running it here so it was all up in the air as to how it would go.
Don’t know if I will attempt another one in the future, I might, but it would be a long time from now.
Making puzzles is fun but difficult, you have to figure out your audience, how you want them to participate (groups by themselves) and strike a balance between difficulty and fun. Also determining how much of a hint you want to give for each puzzle factors into that and was something I struggled with in making these.
Also as someone mentioned I didn’t make some of these puzzles easy to solve for colourblind people, so that would be something I would have to consider next time.
Most importantly I need to think of puzzles, and that is the most difficult part, I want to do something different and interesting with them, not all generic puzzles. I did think of one when I was running this but it would require a fair bit more time to do and I am all puzzled out for now. As for the difficulty I don’t know, I guess it depends on how people felt about these ones.
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Also that reminds me if you would like to comment on how you found the puzzles difficulty, the enjoyment or confusion factor in solving them, any issues you had with them etc. please let me know I would love to hear it.
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I have put the solutions to the puzzles at the bottom of the original post. Peruse them at your leisure.
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I’m curious what the other way of figuring out the magic eye puzzle was, that you say some people used
(I just realized a lot of my posts are me being curious)
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I think all the puzzles were good, here’s the breakdown on each one.
Puzzle 1
It took a bit of work on the 1st one, and I almost did it without the terraria hint, but was stuck at the hellstone and the topaz; and until I checked the gems part of the wiki, the game name only confused me even more (since I was looking at the mine-able minerals, not gems). Overall pretty good.
Puzzle 2
The morse code was really good. A bit of image editing to search for each character individually, and then getting a morse translator. Some work to be done, but not too much or too hard to turn people (or at least me) away. Great job on this one.
Puzzle 3
This one took a bit of work to solve, but mostly because I think i chose a weak QR translator. I had to not only put the two halves of the code together, but also to recolor one of the halves to have the same colors as the other one. For some reason when I downloaded the picture to crop it, the top half of the code was darker than the bottom half, and the translator I used couldn’t translate it due to the difference.
Overall a bit too simple though. If you ever use it again, maybe break up the QR code into more pieces (5 or 6) and randomize the order in which they appear.
Puzzle 4
Clever way to hint to the encryption type for the message, but if you know your memes a bit too short. Maybe a 2 step process would work a bit better here, have the base64 message give not the answer, but a hint to the answer itself. for example: “good work, now for the final step, use the hint given for puzzle 1 to solve this:” followed by an adress coded with other types of teraria blocks.
Puzzle 5
Probably the best designed of the puzzles, or at the very least the second best after the morse code one. The only reason I didn’t complete it was because the subject matter of the code was something I had no interest in (I had no idea who Blind Melon, Ed Sheeran,The Clovers or Starsailors were, and no interest whatsoever to look more deeply into their wiki pages than a passing glance, same for Tailor Swift).
There is no fault in how you coded it, the chosen code simply happened to be something I personally had no interest in, or inclination to find more about.
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So to make the words easier to see when the program I used added a shadow to the text. If you look at the picture closely you can see the shadow for the letters spelling out the address, though it is hard to see. I believe some people used some image editing software just to mess with the picture a bit and just read it from the shadows.
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